At our BBQ on Saturday, my friend Ngasseu who is from Cameroon was just grooving to the soca that was playing.

Now that I've looked up music from Cameroon, I totally see why!

Rudi Affolter and Gwen Tighe have both experienced strong religious visions. He is an atheist; she a Christian. He thought he had died; she thought she had given birth to Jesus. Both have temporal lobe epilepsy.

Like other forms of epilepsy, the condition causes fitting but it is also associated with religious hallucinations. Research into why people like Rudi and Gwen saw what they did has opened up a whole field of brain science: neurotheology.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Over the years, I have increasingly believed that mental illness and neurological disorders hide inside religious fanatics.

The message may be well-intentioned and honorable, but it’s made null if its delivery misses its mark. Madonna cannot expect to have her convictions taken seriously if she enters into a socio-political issue as an outsider who has barged her way in with little to no firsthand knowledge of what she speaks and who has no intention of following up on her message.

Apparently, Madonna lectured Romanian fans on discrimination against Roma people in that country.

Act One. Fred and Barney.

Contributing editor Jonathan Goldstein’s story about trouble in the

Town of Bedrock. One day, when he’s backing out of his driveway, Barney accidentally runs over and kills a dinosaur that belongs to his neighbor and best friend, Fred. In the ensuing series of phone messages (performed by Jonathan [as Barney] and contributor David Rakoff [as Fred]), the two friends air some long-simmering grievances in their friendship—which might end it altogether.

Seriously.
It's worth listening to the whole segment, but the Fred and Barney bit cracked me up.
It starts at 6:02

How to hide from unwanted clients:

At almost the same time, details emerged that Muhammad-Haroon was facing charges of theft under $5,000 and was recently fired from his summer job with IBM. He was also scheduled to leave the country the day of his supposed abduction, which is not allowed for individuals facing criminal charges.

They say that personalities respond to stress differently.
They're said to have a "fight or flight" reaction to situations that are challenging.

This situation is one of those "why the hell?" things.

You get a job at IBM and you steal from them?
Like IBM is some sort of amateur operation that doesn't have security in place?
Dude, you got a job at a company that most students would be happy for the opportunity to have.

I suspect that his "flight" response was because he couldn't bring himself to tell his parents about the theft. Now, instead of quietly dealing with it as the stupid actions of an immature young person, and a family affair...now, the whole country knows what you've done.

Well done.

LOS ANGELES - "Take my mother-in-law - please," isn't a joke you're likely to hear often these days from Sunda Croonquist. The veteran comic is being sued by her mother-in-law after making her the punchline of too many jokes.

The mother-in-law is accusing Croonquist of spreading false, defamatory and racist lies with in-law jokes that have become a staple of her routine in nightclubs and on television channels like Comedy Central.

Listen to some of her Mother in Law jokes here...find it on the sidebar.

Is it a way to ramp up her career?
For real?

Royal Tea's via J-Walk Blog.

Click on image for more info.

via Bits and Pieces

(NSFW)

(the video is not complete...but, you'll get the idea)

Rhythm 10, 1973 - Marina Abramovic

In her first performance Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand (5-finger fillet). Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and recorded the operation.

After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging together past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally

I must admit, I don't get it.

Is this for real?



via I have seen the whole of the internet

Stuff White People do says:

More and more frequently these days, white people are claiming that they don't see race -- that they're "colorblind."

"You know something?" they might say to a black person, "I never even notice that you're black!"

This statement always makes me laugh...because it's a little condescending (not to mention impossible), even though it's meant to make someone feel more "at ease".

White people usually think that "racists" are the ones who harbor racist thoughts and feelings, and thus the ones who commit "racist" acts. However, as Derald Wing Sue suggests, there are many, many ways in which white people can act with unwarranted and unconscious aggression toward people of color, and thus, act in "racist" ways. Mistaking non-white people for service workers is but one common example.

I've mistaken white people for service workers, and I've been mistaken for one as well.
So, this is also one of those things that can be misunderstood as racism.
Although I see the bloggers' point, and know that it does happen often.

But, sometimes when it does...it's the embarrassment alone that puts that person in their place.

A friend of mine who was the facilitator for a workshop and entered the kitchen of the office where she was going to be teaching for a glass of water. An employee immediately started giving her orders for where the platters were supposed to go in the conference room.

When the employee realized her mistake...

There are many reasons to be angry about the lack of experience many white people have with not only race, but culture as well.

The irony is that many people who point out racism, and how they've been slighted don't see themselves as racist when they make disparaging remarks about white people.
I've been in situations where I've had to tolerate anti-white remarks, and in some cases been outright insulted, and unapologetically at that.

Racism doesn't only have a white face. We all have a long way to go, people.

Link via aloha nico.

There are songs that I was introduced to only through my mister and his Guyanese old school ways. There are certain songs that he plays that remind me of the Guyanese dances he used to take me to when we first met.

Dances where older couples glide across the floor perfectly, and you can be thrown back to another time...a time before you were born, but relived through the complete moves of another generation.

He designed his own car, and it's pretty great.

See what he did here.

via A Welsh View

Every time I see something like this, I think about how much is wasted for amusement or "art".

When I read that some community has made the biggest pancake or the biggest muffin, and they list 750 eggs, 23 gallons of milk, and so on...all I can think about is the people in those communities who could have used those eggs and milk and flour...and not for amusement, for food.

It's just one of those things that makes me suck my teeth.

Elizabeth A. Thrasher, 40, of the 1300 block of Farm Valley Drive, is accused of posting an ad to the website’s “Casual Encounters” section to humiliate the 17-year-old daughter of a woman her ex-husband was dating.

I'll never understand why people like this target innocents.
What does the 17 year old daughter have to do with anything?
Why should she have to be humiliated?

Because Liz is nuts, that's why.

Exercises in self-esteem building.

via Funkaoshi.